Give me that Old Time Nihilism

So, as I was walking about campus today I ran into a militant vegan...and I've caught your attention.

I had found a pamphlet concerning the maltreatement of animals in slaughterhouses urging people to cut back on meat and lobby the government for better/more sanitary conditions for the animals that we eat. I agree that our food animals should be kept in cleaner conditions and not tortured as they may be in some cases, but it was the conversation with the Vegan Marine that almost made me puke.

He explained to me that his organisation was for the elleviating of all suffering around the world. This sounded like a pretty good idea until I asked him why he would not rather spend his time elleviating the pain of say Somalians and Rwandans (ie humans) to which he answered and this is a quote, "there is no difference between a Somalian and a chicken". I refrained from spitting in his face for this blantantly racist and animalistic comment. It is a sad day when the rights of humans are considred less than the rights of animals.

The pamphlet also contained photographs of dead male chicks, ie chickens not allowed to hatch and the eggs merely smashed and the foetus left to die. They demonised this and arguably compared it to the Holocaust. This is made even more complex for the fact that the man also told me that for humans he is pro-choice. So he oppossed the abortion of chicken foetuses, yet woudn't think twice about killing a human foetus. The barbarity is almost laughable if my throat wasn't so full of vomit.

During the conversation, my firend asked him if he also oppossed the killing of trees. He said yes. I then asked him why he was wearing cotton clothing, and asked him where we stop in elleviating suffering. He said that it is a balance that humans must acheive by consuming only what is needed. For a minimalist he was suprisingly well dressed.

The greatest contradiction in this man's stance is that he did not want to tell anyone to stop eating meat altogether, just limit. No, if you believe that there is no destinction between humans and animals then every hamburger must be murder. In an attempt to be more politically correct and not offend anyone, he sufficiently castrated his argument beyond recovery. I left him politely, telling him that he wasn't as bad as PETA , but I am so shocked that someone could have lost his senses so badly that his opinion was just a flashy new gun shooting nothign but blanks.

I end with a summary of an aphorism from Fredrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science. In it there is a mad man running around with a lantern shouting that "God is dead, we have killed him". He then goes on to say that now that God is dead, "which way is up, which way is down, we shall all go spinning out of control" (these are not direct quotes). It seems to me that this society has completely lost its bearings. Humanists are bad enough in their faith that humans can achieve greatness through eductaion and progress, but these brutally disgusting animalist make me gag. They have no standard for what constitutes anything really. Give me a good old honest nihilist or someone who believes in God. Either God exists and we should try to figure that out or God does not exist and we should all go and do what we see fit which also sounds like a good old time. But, to create transient and inadequate systems of value based on fleeting ideologies is downright stupid and leads to the loss of what it means to be human, whatever that may be.

Eat drink and be merry or believe in God, or perhaps both at the same time, but don't feed me this vegan propoganda. Life is a hot steak not a chilled bowl of guspacho.